Mentally ill. Either by birth, or early developmental environment, or both. Normal human reaction to violent wrongs done to them. Just doing what they think is right to defend their way of life. I believe that "evil" is a mystical explanation for the previously unknown motivations of humans. Just as "posession" was an explanation for the more extreme forms of mental illness. Evil implies supernatural entities (spirits, demons, etc.).
Damn, I am having bad luck today. My posts keep being lost at the bottom of the page right befor it turns. *sigh*
Ha! Clockwood, I give full credit to you for posting the idea first. I should have read more thoroughly. Sorry.
When people make reference to evil people I usually respond with;"They were all babies once" Obviously with that comment I believe that evil is an issue of nuture not nature.
Which would seem to me of course, short-sighted. Are all babies the same? Are you sure that the chemical operation of each baby would yeild the same result given the same stimulous? I think some people are "born to be bad", in the sense that their initial conditions leave little room for future development of empathy, and thus they simply can't give a fuck if you're in pain, and may even learn to enjoy seeing others in such a condition. I don't think it typical, and many are "bad" because of nurture as you say, but it would seem likely to me that nurture is not always the culprit, just considering the statistical ramifications of billions and billions of folks.
None of you have answered my very simple questions. I'm beginning to think you don't like your own answers. Here they are again. Superluminal, I hear your answers. So are you saying that the rapist, who raped the woman "cause the whore deserved it," is evil? Or that those who "perform horrible acts out of vengence or redirected agression, feeling that they are merely repaying a wrong done in the past to an individual or group" are evil? Or that the fanatic who "believes he is directed by god's mandate" is evil? Do you think each of them is all evil?
Damnit, Cottontop. Read everyone's damn posts. They answered your fucking question. I can't think of these people as evil because I don't even believe evil exists at all. Stupid, shortsighted, insane, or just seeing a different world than the rest of us. But not evil, as the term is commonly used.
There is no absolute definition of good and evil!!!!!!!!! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Sorry. I had to vent. Yaba Daba :m:
Maybe because they feel bad things and take that out into action? Anger, wrath, etc... could lead to violent actions, all people feel it sometimes but we don't act on it, while "bad people" do. As they say, the "universe" or the "world" knows nothing of good and bad, it is blind. Humans know of it, and God wants us to follow the good.
I assume bad as in "bad for society". They are bad because there is room in society to be bad, and to benefit from it.
There are cases that show that an action, once thought to be good, turns out to be bad and the other way around. For most actions, their effect on the actor and/or others is clear. If it serves to help, improve, enlighten, clarify, reduce harm, or any of the many others possible positive outcomes one can list, it is considered good. Most things are not polar in their effects though and are colored with both good and bad aspects. If an individual of great perception could stand apart from the action and be truly unaffected by it, they could judge the net effect on all involved and determine the positive or negative value. We are all compelled to do that for ourselves and like most concepts in life, we have varying degrees of accuracy (insight and experience) in various situations. Evil is a word that evokes some sort of entity or state of being apart from the action that is demonstrating it. A person may frequently do terrible things and be seen as evil but they can also do things that aren't evil just as a person that is anything but bad (see above) most of the time can still do terrible things. It is the action that is "evil" and even then evil is just a descriptive word. I'm waiting for a phone call and need a cup of coffee.
I guess what I am saying is that a new born baby is incapable of culpability. Of deliberate evil. This stems from the premise that evil can only be deemed as even close to being evil if that act has the support of deliberate will. I personally do not care too much for the word "evil" except to use it as a way of describing an act that the perpetrator of that act himself would see as evil. The legal requirement of the ability to know right from wrong is quite necessary in determining guilt and whether that act is evil per se...I feel. But even so as SuperL has suggested all human behaviour could be in some way considered as a mental health issue. If some one could show me proof of an evil new born child I may change my opinion.
lol. it's funny how you manage to refute yourself while convincing yourself you're right. someone who is trying to hurt me is a bad person. they are probably "good" to someone else. idiot.
That's not what he said. Read my post above. (Very clear Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ) Yaba Daba :m:
sheez man, it's an opinion, get it? idiot has to do with good or bad depending on who you ask about it. trying to put good and bad into non-relative terms is utter fallacy. that doesn't negate the utility of the terms. in relative terms, they make perfect sense. damn that was a good sammich. damn that dude who raped that 8 year old and buried her alive with her dolly was a piece of shit (bad person). there is can be a reason to think something good or bad by one's own standard for every situation every human ever encounters, excepting a small percentage who have shed or don't fathom the notion. afterthought: it just occured to me that absolutist terms are only valuable if you transform them through the subjective consideration, like transforming polar coordinates before calculating in equations from cartesians. hmm. aftertheafterthought: consider the term good with the absence of an observer. where can the idea 'good' be found? nowhere. an observer grants this status. now the same situation. where can the idea be found? if anywhere, in the observer. if found there, to say it wasn't found would be a lie. the truth of its existence in the observer however is all that can possibly be, for there is no other place for it (even the hypothesis of "ideas floating around out there outside of minds" can be attributed to the mind of that who hypothesized). each observer will assign value as they must in any given moment (even if they assign {null}).
